How to create a Company Culture of good governance through QA

Quality Assurance (QA) is an essential process within any business, but did you know it’s also the key to creating a culture of good governance? Martin Ellingham, Senior Product Manager for Aptean (Respond) explains why.

How do you know that your business is moving in the right direction? How can you tell that your teams are working together towards one shared goal? How do you maintain your success in a sustainable way for years to come? The answer to all three questions is governance. It might not sound exciting but good governance is vital for success in your business; especially when it comes to managing customer feedback effectively.

Say, for instance, that a customer gets in touch with a complaint. How do you make sure that their feedback gets to the people who need to see it and act upon it as swiftly as possible? Without governance, you have no effective way to know, which can potentially leave gaps between teams and departments for information to fall into.

In any successful business, each department needs to work together sharing unity and focus. This means been able to trace information flows across your business and been able to treat your customers equally. Without the shared knowledge of how to respond to different customer queries, different agents will offer different solutions to the same problem resulting in damage to your reputation and your bottom line.

So, how do you bring in a culture of good governance to improve customer interactions and boost performance?

Using QA to bring teams together

The first step towards establishing a culture of good governance in your business is making sure QA is consistent across every department. Most companies acknowledge the importance of QA, but still overlook how it can bring teams together and stamp out breakdowns in communication.

Implemented properly, QA can transform the way you share insight and intelligence. It is an essential element in handling customer complaints. With visibility and encouraging a shared culture of quality across your business, QA gives you the ability to prevent costly breakdowns in customer care.

Developing the right framework for your business

Once you’ve identified how QA can improve your information-sharing processes; the next step is to find the right system, which will support your goal of establishing a culture of quality and good governance. How you do this will depend largely on your business, what success means to you and how you can achieve it within your corporate structure.

Some argue that quality standards are set by the board of executives and implemented from the top down. Others suggest that culture has to come from those on the frontline, built by the people who interact with core business processes on a daily basis.

Either way, you need everyone’s buy in for it to work. This is easier said than done but you can achieve it by putting in place a system that empowers individuals to contribute to the collective and encourages departments to work together.

Technically speaking, you need a system that not only collects all the essential data from customer interactions; it must also identify and deal with wider customer service issues. With this in place, you can expose problems you’d never have discovered before and come up with responses that place an emphasis on quality. With this mixture of customer insight and response going on within your business, you’ll soon notice the quality of customer interactions improve with standards rising in every department.

Begin to build a collaborative culture

Once you have the right system in place and running smoothly, you’ll see a culture of quality begin to take shape within your teams. Change won’t necessarily be easy to come by as you could easily find one department reluctant to switch to your new system because they’re already happy with the one they have. It works for them but not the business as a whole. It’s important to help them see the bigger picture in instances like this.

Your teams need to be aware that whatever department they belong to, they all have an impact on customers. That’s why you need a QA system to track, manage and pull every bit of information together. It provides support for every customer interaction, regardless of who’s adding data at any given time.

Effective QA leads to good governance (and happy customers)

With the right QA tools in place, good governance will be much easier to achieve. Not only will you have the visibility across your business to see what’s working well and what isn’t, you’ll also have the means to act on issues and set standards within your organisation.

Ultimately, you need to stick to the goal of making sure your customers’ voices are heard throughout your business. After all, without them your company isn’t going anywhere. By making sure your people have the tools to truly ‘listen’ to what customers are saying and respond positively to them, you’ll create a much more effective platform for long term success.

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